Oswald Gutsmann: Windische Sprachlehre

This is the main page for accessing Oswald Gutsmann's Windische Sprachlehre which was published in Klagenfurt/Celovec, the capital of the Austrian province of Carinthia/Kärnten/Koros^ka in 1777. ^{Note 1}

The book is a grammatical description of Slovenian with many supplementary word lists. Numerous dialect features from Carinthia are provided.

While the German used in the book could be rendered using the modern German alphabet without causing any problems, the situation regarding the Slovenian is different. For the most part, Slovenian sounds were represented using the German conventions. This meant, for example, that the [t^s] sound was represented using the letter <z> in both languages.

For the sounds [s] and [z], four letters were utilized: S, s, ß, and . The first was used whenever an uppercase letter was required. The last was used for [s] in almost all non-morpheme-final positions. Given the structure of German, no significant semantic ambiguities arose.

However, in Slovenian, minimal pairs such as modern <sraka> vs. <zraka> and <kosa> vs. <koza> exist. In order to maintain this distinction in writing, the German letters were used differently. S and s were used for [z]. The old-fashioned was used for lowercase [s] except in word-final position where the sequence s was used. The capital for [s] required some inventiveness: a backwards comma was prepended to S, creating .

I tried using in-line images for the [s] characters. Even when cheating by raising the backwards comma though, the S portion of the character is still above the baseline. Consequently, the sequence of ,S was decided on as a reasonable approximation: the comma never appears in this context. On the other hand, in-line images are used for the old-fashioned ; these rest nicely on the baseline because there is no descender on the character. However, problems still remain because the is not automatically resized when the user increases or decreases the font size.

Any criticism, suggestions or general comments would be appreciated. Please contact me at stermole@chass.utoronto.ca.

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NOTES

¹ The whole book was typed into a word processor. This version has not been proofread sufficiently. The proofreading will be done in due course.